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Salutations.

For context , I recently bought land in the region of Mafra , Portugal.
Climate is Mediterranean temperate, the land is in a valley so the soil has a big concentration of clay resulting from the deposits coming from uphill over the years.
The slope is gentle and the southern boundary ends in a creek that runs in the winter and dries out in the summer.

Now for my question …

I bought a chipper shredder to take care of all the pruning leftovers and all the scraps that can’t be used for firewood. Mostly pear , apple , plum, bay leaf and quince wood.
Quince and bay leaf wood are rather hard and used to make tools.

Needless to say the machine broke after a couple uses , even when i only fed it branches of the recommended 4mm thickness.

My question is, what do I do with rest of the leftovers from last year , and also this years pruning ?

Options I considered are:

– Make gentle swales and bury them. Lots of digging by hand since i don’t own or plan on having a tractor.
– Pile them up somewhere and wait for decomposition. Grass will grow in between and make it a nightmare to deal with in the future.
– Burn them … easy and fast , but quite inefficient in terms of resource management and regeneration of the land , which is the ultimate goal.
– Eventually rent a proper shredder and take care of it all … currently not a real option since money is scarce!

Any suggestion is welcome , appreciate it !

As the season winds down, I’m starting to plan my crazy ideas for next year, going into my second season of the food forest. I’m hoping to integrate some annuals directly into the food forest rather than keeping them all in a separate, traditional annuals garden.

1) Fava beans around fruit/nut trees

Goal: add an easy annual nitrogen fixer around my trees that can grow along the tree cages

2) Potatoes between shrubs in my berry hedge

Goal: deep mulch/ruth stout potatoes worked well to kill grass, so by planting these between young shrubs (each about 5’ spacing) I can help remove turf and soften up the ground a bit as the shrubs grow up and expand.

3) Sunchokes and hopniss

Goal: Neither of these are annuals but the goal is to have hopniss vining up sunchokes as a support plant in a system comprised of two root plants that can be harvested at the same time.

4) Sunflowers as shade for young pawpaws

Goal: young pawpaws need shade, this can help provide additional shade especially in the hottest months of the year

5) winter squash along asparagus bed

Goal: provide ground cover for asparagus with sprawling squash leaves, from squash plants that are far enough away to not compete directly with asparagus roots.

Thoughts? Any ideas for onion or pepper companions in the food forest?

amphicarpaea bracteata. A plant native to the southeast United States. It’s edible tubers were eaten raw and cooked by the Native Americans. I’m wanting to do some experiments with it to see if I could be domesticated. It may be a project that outlives me but it will be interesting to produce a new food crop. I’m also going to do similar experiments with Ipomea Pandurata.

So this Oliver loquat is about three feet tall right now. He was in a pot for a year and a half and was root bound. I planted him. in a hole about 4 months ago. I was afraid to disturb the roots because I”d heard loquats were finicky but planned to come back in and move him and work more with him, but never got back to it.

He’s started to get little fruit buds and some leaves but has not really grown in size. Not thriving. I decided to dig down with my hands around the root ball to see if I could check him to see if roots were in a good position. The picture is about 3″ down. I’m hesitant to disturb him any more, but also concerned that if he is not properly positioned he might grow wrong. It does look like some of the roots are pointing up.

Should I go further or let him be? I’ve already disturbed the roots quite a bit by digging and snapped some tiny ones.

Also, I”m going to plant some non-edible ginger along side him. How far out should that be?

If it matters, zone 9a Florida. This hole isn’t very big, maybe three feet across.

Thank you.

https://preview.redd.it/q0s2jpm15cxf1.jpg?width=3060&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=951275f1cd89565b1555cf1a550f9da47ca0ac17

More about my agroecological garden can be seen at https://agroecologymap.org/en/accounts/marcelo-soares-souza/gallery